Spent today driving. Mostly on the right side of the road. Had to go to London to fetch number one daughter. Her sojourn in the smoke has finished and she now has to come back to Real Life(tm) in Hull for a while.
The M1 was actually quite kind to me on the way down, but threw in a half hour delay on the way back. But we did get back to Hull in time for Friday Fish and Chips.
Off on our hols tomorrow, which will probably be a cue for even more driving...
All I wanted to do was build up a little mailing list. I had a bunch of incoming mail messages and I wanted to take the address of each sender and use it to construct a list of recipients I could send the same message to. Common sense left me thinking that there would be something in Outlook that would make this easy.
Common sense (at least mine) was wrong.
Outlook let me laboriously create a mailing list from the addresses by hand, and then hid the list in a place where I can't actually find it. No kidding. This is obviously a variant of the highly secure "Write Only Memory" devices that we invented years ago.
Google mail sort of let me do it, but I had to laboriously insert the names one at a time, and it informed me, just enough times to be irritating, that it already knew some of the addresses anyway.
Finally I got the messages sent off, only to find that some of them ended up in spam filters. Such is life.
If anyone knows of a tool or trick that makes what I want to do easy, then I'd love to know it.
Today might be the end of the world. It seems that mad scientists have created a machine that could destroy everything. Or could it?
Before worrying too much about the safety of the experiment, it is worth spending a bit of time on why it is being performed. It is all to do with something called "The Standard Model", which has been created to explain how the universe works.
If you try to hit a tennis ball really hard you have to work hard. This is because the ball has mass, and you need to put in work to make that mass move. You have to work even harder with a bowling ball, because that has greater mass. Take your bowling ball to pieces at the lowest possible level and you find a bunch of particles inside the atoms that it is made of. The Standard Model has to explain how all these particles work together to give you something that behaves like a bowling ball. We can prove the Standard Model by finding evidence of all the particles that it says must be there.
Thing is, one of the most important particles, the one that makes mass work, and makes a tennis ball behave differently from a bowling ball from a mass point of view, has not been observed in the wild yet. This particle is called the "Higgs Boson", after Peter Higgs, who suggested it as a way to make the Standard Model work. Unfortunately you can only observe the existence of these particles at very start of the universe, when things are compressed really tightly together. The rest of the time they fade into the background and we can only infer that they exist by the fact that the universe seems to behave in the way the Standard Model predicts.
So, to prove that the model is right, we have to create the same conditions as the start of the universe by bashing some bits of atoms together where we can look at them. Then this magic particle will appear, we will see it and we will know the Standard Model works. Or it won't appear and we'll know that it is duff. Or the universe will end, and we will not know anything....
The danger is that when you bash these particles together you can't be absolutely sure what you will get. You might compress them so much that they turn into a black hole, and suck everything in. You might create particles that haven't existed since the origins of the universe, and these might combine with everything around them and turn all matter into a new state, which could be grey goo.
The bad news is that since nobody has done this experiment in this way, nobody can really say what will happen when we do it. Scientists are very hard to pin down. They will never say "That won't happen" they will say "That is very unlikely to happen". By "very unlikely" they probably mean things like "hasn't happened in the last 13.7 billion years", but it still rings alarm bells. The weatherman sometimes says that rain is "very unlikely" and then we get wet anyway.
As far as I'm concerned, I feel quite safe. The kind of collisions that are going to happen in the experiment are taking place all around us all the time as high energy particles from space bash into the earth. I find it hard to believe that the people around the device are prepared to risk the future of the universe just to prove a scientific point. And if I'm wrong, nobody will be around to sue me anyway.
I wrote this piece as a way of organising my thoughts for a local radio interview I did about the Hadron Collider this morning.
I've just done the interview and it seemed to go OK. Everyone at the station said how wonderful it was, they reckoned that, given the circumstances, I might as well go out on a high....
Hah. Just as I am basking in the reflected glory of my item in the Hull Daily Mail yesterday, news arrives that Paul Chapman has got an article about the Venus Project in today's Guardian. On page 17, nearer the front than mine.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/09/archaeology
Ah well. I'm on Radio Humberside tomorrow morning talking about the Giant Hadron Collider. I expect Paul will be on Radio 4 on Thursday.....
And, right on time, to cap my radio efforts here is Paul on Sky News...
I've made the papers! Picture and everything. If you rush down to the newsagents and grab a copy of the Hull Daily Mail for today (Monday) you will find me, larger than life and twice as ugly, on page 18. The story is about my MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) award and my involvement with the Imagine Cup.
Great stuff.
Today was the day of number one daughter's abseil for money. She was doing the jump for Marie Curie Cancer Care (you can still sponsor her here). The venue was Guy's Hospital at London Bridge in, er, London.
We turned up nice and early, daughter went off in the lift to practice on the top of the building and we waited with the other anxious observers.
The building is very tall. You can just see one of the earlier arrivals making their way down the building in the middle of the picture.
The folks next to us had real style, cheering as their friends came down and even uncorking champagne. We just waited. And waited. Then the jumps were put on hold for while, then further weather checks were made. Then daughter re-appeared at the bottom, still in her harness and wearing a safety hat with the word Cheese on it (something which was never satisfactorily explained). Then the wind and rain got worse and they were forced to abandon abseiling for the day.
I was kind of relieved, but very sorry for daughter, who had got all the way to the top, done the training, been pretty much the next person to go and then been told "Not today". It is just one of those things, it is nice to know that they take safety very, very seriously, and they will be rescheduling for later this month.
But we did have a great trip to London, and I got some nice photographs.
HMS Belfast, and Tower Bridge
"The Gherkin", and friends
I've been taking pictures of business cards and sending them to Evernote. This works really well because the system does optical character recognition on the text on the cards, and makes it searchable. Very impressive, all the more so because it actually works.
For the best results I used a setting on the camera which is specially for taking pictures of text. Out of interest I pointed the camera at myself and took a picture. I got an image with the word "Rob" on it.
The University of Hull is one of the partners in the Venus Project. The aim of the work is to preserve underwater archeological sites by making a completely accurate record of them, and provide a realistic visualisation of what they are actually like to visit. Paul Chapman from the department is giving a presentation of the system later this week, and as a taster he set it up in our visualisation suite and let us have a go on it.
Darren navigates the submersible to the site while Paul watches.
The system provides an eerily accurate version of the view that you would get from a submersible craft if you explored the sites yourself. You can move around just as you would in the submarine, and all artifacts are there just as when they were discovered.
Fantastic stuff.
Earlier this year I was awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status for another year. I was really pleased about this and the university seems quite pleased too. They even wrote a little story about it and the our Imagine Cup success over the years, with a specially taken scary photo of me in my "pyjama shirt". You can find out more, and marvel at the picture, here.
Just watched the end of "Last Choir Standing", a BBC music contest thing where the title pretty much sums it up, although they had to sing against each other rather than a potentially more interesting mass brawl.
Anyway, I just can't get my head around the concept of a load of blokes stood together singing "All By Myself". Just doesn't seem right somehow.
And the best choir came third, which is even worse in my book.
Can you spot the problem?
I bought these dice ages ago, with the intention of taking 'Vegas by storm. One of them is loaded and one of them is not. Sneaky. Only difficultly is that the package doesn't tell me which is the loaded one.
Any ideas for tests I can perform to be absolutely sure which is the loaded die?
 Had a really good customer experience today. I wasn't expecting it, but I am very impressed. I had a problem with my little Fuji FinePix camera and I took it into Hull to see what the place I had bought it from would do for me. Turned out that they did quite a lot. Suffice it to say that they fixed me up completely, and they didn't really have to.
If you are thinking of getting a camera I can strongly recommend this shop, in the Prospect Centre in Hull. Their prices are very keen and their service is excellent.
Act One: "That Looks Shiny"
In which our hero visits the garage to fetch his gardening gloves and wonders why all the wood leaning against the garage wall appears to be strangely shiny. Almost as if it was covered in water. Which it was.
Act Two: "Search for the Source"
In which our hero learns the joys of bath dismantling and the use of a "Really Nice Hammer" (borrowed from next door) to take up floorboards. Finally resolved when the cold water pipe feeding the bath taps is found to be leaking.
Act Thee: (yet to be completed)
In which, with a bit of luck, a plumber can be made to appear and replace the leaky bit of pipe (how can copper just, like, get a hole in it?) and order, and the side of the bath, be re-established.
Lessons learnt from this narrative:
Watched a carry on film this afternoon. The Carry On team took on the Anthony and Cleopatra tale. It has one of the best lines of all time:
Caesar: (being pursued by an angry mob) "Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me.."
Wonderful.
This morning number one wife mentioned that she thought the dishwasher was leaking. The basis of her argument was that the carpet underneath it was wet. This premise was to me far too flimsy. There were lots of other reasons why the carpet might be wet, and so I took upon myself to investigate all of them first.
So, having dismantled the plumbing outside the house and run several tests on the washing machine I was able to conclude, to my satisfaction, that the dishwasher was indeed leaking.
I'm left wondering if as you get older you just assume that things people tell you are wrong, or whether this is something that I've been arrogantly doing all through my life.
The only good news was that the repair, cleaning the door seal, was actually very easy.
For the last few days I've been working at home on some XNA stuff. The idea was that I'd get a lot done by shutting myself away with no distractions. Apparently J.K. Rowling managed to finish writing the last Harry Potter novel by locking herself in a hotel room with a word processor and not coming out until it was finished. I can't afford a hotel, so I'm all alone at home trying to do something similar.
It did not go too well to be honest. It is unbelievable the number of different things that you suddenly find to do when you have to do some writing. Particularly at home, where there is always something to tidy up, put into alphabetical order, move to a different position, or eat.
I actually enjoy the creative process once I get started. I don't think that it is writer's block that I suffer from, more like a torrent of different ideas, each of which has to be kicked in our out of the project and then shuffled into its proper place. And I can tell when I'm near finishing, as I have a strong urge to take the whole thing to bits and start again. I also start to question the very tenets on which the whole thing is based.
I think on that basis I'm just about done....
We've just had an "away weekend'. Part of this involved being away. At the weekend.
We stayed at the Purple Hotel in Tewksbury. I'm new to Purple hotels. They are springing up around the country (there is even one in Doncaster). They are actually quite nice. Very good prices and a little more too them that places like Travelodges. Breakfast on Sunday was particularly nice. And everyone on the staff seemed keen to make sure that our stay was as pleasant as possible. Recommended.
Number one son has left home. He's done it before, during his university career, but each time it was with the expectation that he would come back.
Not so this time.
He has gainful employment, a new place to live and lots of good times to come.
Good luck son, it will not be the same at home without you.
This morning on the radio they were saying that the best way to see the new Batman film is on the super large IMAX cinema screen.
Like we are doing this evening.
I mentioned to number one son how lucky he is to be able to hang around with me, what with me being a person who does so many cool things.
"Yeah." he replied. "Like opening the fridge door...."
I'm really going to miss him.
When I was younger I used buy single records on 7" plastic. I've got a whole load in a box up in the loft, alongside the turntable that I used to play them on. Occasionally I get one out, look at the tiny wavy groove on it and shake my head in amazement that we actually used to store music that way.
Last week I really fancied hearing one of my old singles again ("Living by Numbers" by New Musik). So I searched out the YouTube video and had a very retro TV experience, even down to the blurred picture and muffled sound we used to get on our telly back in 1982. And then I wondered if I could still buy it. And it turns out I can. Amazon have links with vendors that sell all kinds of old stuff and so earlier this week the CD with the entire album ("From A to B") turned up in the post. (great album. Starts with a very convincing doorbell sound which actually had us checking the front door......)
This is called "long tail" marketing. There are probably not that many fans of New Musik out there, but there are enough worldwide to make it worth someone keeping a bunch of copies of the disk and sending one out every now and then.
Now I'm looking for some albums by Synergy.....
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
